Posts Tagged ‘Cogswell College Computer Engineering’

The following article was published in Computing Now on 11/27/12 and written by Sixto Ortiz Jr.

Facial recognition is becoming increasingly popular.

Applications such as Facebook and Google+ are using the technology to augment their social-interaction offerings by, for example, automatically adding names of people to photos posted on the sites.

The Departments of Motor Vehicles in 32 of the 50 US states are also utilizing facial recognition in conjunction with driver’s license photos. This lets the DMVs determine if someone has illegally acquired licenses under more than one name.

Law-enforcement and national-security agencies such as the US FBI are using the technology to, for example, compare a still picture taken at a crime scene against a database of known felons.

However, the growing use of the approach is causing concern for privacy advocates, who contend that companies and individuals could use facial recognition for activities such as unwanted marketing and identity theft.

In addition, false positives by facial-recognition systems could create problems such as public-safety officials detaining an innocent person at an airport.

And many people may not even know they are in a face-recognition database and are at risk, said Jennifer Lynch, staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital-rights advocacy organization.